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Establishing a Tradition of Sportsmanship by Tom Murray
Posted by: Mark Logan on May 16, 2007 - 1:21 pm

There was a time, long ago, when most high school sports teams functioned without trained coaches. High school students organized their own practices, trained, developed and implemented strategies and competed with only an elected teammate-captain to direct them. Schools provided an adult manager, usually a faculty member, who made arrangements for games and supervised the athletes. The manager’s role was minimal except for the important function of promoting the health and safety of athletes and assuring that high standards of ethical sportsmanship were observed.

Much has changed in high school sports in the last one hundred years. In the twenty-first century, interscholastic athletic programs have highly trained coaches who have extensive knowledge about their respective sports. Coaches study their sport by attending coaching clinics, viewing videos and reading to become better equipped to help their athletes compete successfully. Also, they broaden their base of knowledge via the tremendous exposure that intercollegiate and professional sports now enjoy. No one can dispute the fact that today’s high school coaches are better prepared than at any time to help athletes and teams achieve in the arenas of competition.

Still, the heart of a modern coach’s responsibilities is the same as it was for his predecessor, the team manager. Coaches are expected to promote the health and safety of their athletes, a task in which they have earned high grades. They have benefited from the assistance of athletic trainers, physical therapists and sports medicine physicians and from highly visible standards of healthful competition on college and professional levels. Each has helped the high school coach shine in this area.

As for maintaining high standards of ethical sportsmanship, the modern high school coach receives minimal, effective assistance from outside the school and must fight continually against pervasive examples of unacceptable behavior that are witnessed in many college and professional sports.

Expectations for high quality athletic performance are developed for high school athletes in the same fashion as the negative examples of sportsmanship are paraded before them. The result is athletes emulate the athletic skills of top college and professional performers and, at the same time, have their sense of sportsmanship mesmerized into accepting norms of behavior that are antithetical to the mission of high school athletics. Often, parents and team supporters adopt these norms, as well. Coaches benefit from having athletes with ever-increasing skill proficiency, but must face daunting, negative attitudinal baggage when it comes to sportsmanship

What is a coach to do?

One answer is to make community sportsmanship practices a team tradition. To paraphrase Tevye’s well-know line in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Traditions tell us who we are and what is expected of us.

Providing sportsmanship traditions for athletes helps them to understand what it is to be a model of sportsmanship and helps a coach combat negative examples of unacceptable behavior in sports by establishing positive norms of conduct.

• The first part of establishing a tradition of sportsmanship for a team is to engage athletes in identifying the elements of good sportsmanship, by answering the question: What are positive examples of good sportsmanship?
• The second step is to help athletes analyze the examples and develop a list of underlying principles that capture the essence of the ideal of sportsmanship.
• The third step is to identify examples of behavior that the athletes have witnessed which violate the principles of good sportsmanship.
• The final task is to identify a number of positive steps that can be taken during the season to promote the principles of sportsmanship they have developed.

Perhaps, one of the most effective actions that can be taken is to codify the four steps into a team credo and promulgate it for who are associated with the team - the players, coaches, parents, spectators and opposing competitors - to help them better understand the team’s beliefs and commitments.

Here is a simple example that can be personalized.

XXX High School (supply your sport) Team Sportsmanship Credo

We believe these are elements of good sportsmanship:

We believe these are basic principles of sportsmanship:

We believe these are examples of behavior that violate the principles of good sportsmanship:

As individuals and as a team we commit to the following in the expectation that they will promote better sportsmanship:

Signed: (signatures of all team members)

A practice that has been used effectively in a few schools is to present the credo to a visiting team coach and ask for feedback to be mailed to your athletic director about how well your athletic community performed relative to the credo.

There are many ways to make sportsmanship a tradition. Many coaches have demonstrated this effectively. The challenge for everyone in a school’s athletic community is to make sportsmanship a priority and developing the means to establish sportsmanship a proud tradition. Coaches are the leaders who can do this best.




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